Thanatos
by Halcyon Seraphim
Summary: After waking from her coma, Hinamori embarks on a journey both physical and cogitative, a journey to discover the true reasons behind the betrayal of one Aizen Sousuke. AizenHina, and yes, I screwed the manga plot just a tad.


**Thanatos**

Pairing: Aizen/Hinamori. In that order, naturally.

Rating: R. I think. o.O;

Gift!fic for Kiyuu. Thanks to Kisuke-nii for being my editor, your imouto is forever grateful. xP

Everyone else: enjoy.

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach because my plots are no where near as masterful. All rights go to Tite Kubo.

Additional Notes: Hinamori has been gifted with more of a spine in this story…so she's more akin to Omfg!Iattackyou!Hinamori, simply because I like her better that way.

I'm also not very satisfied with this fic because I don't think it's well-written or tasteful, and I don't think I captured their relationship very well. End of summer writer's block…it afflicts me every year. ;; I tried. Bear with me.

------

She drifted, drifted aimlessly, purposelessly, in the noir light of absolute slumber. Consciousness ebbed and flowed, reaching out to claim her and return her to the world of the living—to the realm of perpetual perception, where nothing transpired inexplicably, where cruelty was calculated and transcribed into a science. In all her reluctance, she yearned for eternal respite, desired the ability to slip into oblivion as into a cloak, to circumvent more mourning: another lament, another requiem.

And regardless of the protestations her befuddled mind issued her body, she found her eyelids creaking open. The world of consciousness spun into view, and Hinamori Momo returned to it with the crippled exuberance of a pacifist in the vanguard of war. And awareness—reality—welcomed her in its wicked ways, enveloping her in a melancholy that was as saccharine as it was toxic.

"Aizen-taichou…" Those were the sole words to escape her lips, an ethereal murmuring of her last memory—or rather, of a memory she knew existed, the repression of which she yearned to revoke. He was her taichou, she his fukutaichou—his devotee—and she was _aware_ that the entity she had been mourning was he. "Aizen-taichou…" she repeated thinly.

"Hinamori!" The voice that assaulted her suddenly virginal senses spoke her name in a tone of relief, undeniably of one who, while she herself had drifted within the world of the transient and intangible, been slave to a despoiling reality of his own. But it was, nevertheless, a young voice, an inexperienced voice. Quite blatantly, a voice that did not belong to her taichou, and a voice she yearned to displace with his. "Hinamori, you're all right!"

Hitsugaya Toushirou sped to her side, facilitating her clumsy rise to a sitting position. "Are you thirsty? Hungry? You've been in a coma for so long, you must be both…I shouldn't bother asking…" He was rambling—consummate relief had induced the ability to _ramble _within Hitsugaya, and perhaps on a previous occasion, she would have paused to marvel at such a feat. But there lay more exigent tasks before her—a reckoning with guilt and a plethora of questions.

"No…I'm…I'm really quite fine…"

"Then there must be something else you want…just name it, I'll fetch it. Are you in pain? I could always—"

"Answers."

"…what?"

"Aizen-taichou." Hitsugaya visibly bristled at the mention of the man, eyes that had been freshly thawed resuming their façade of indeterminable ice.

"I trust you remember what he's done to you, then?" Hinamori contemplated his words before shaking her head. "He's responsible for putting you in a coma, Hinamori! The bastard stabbed you in the gut!"

She responded as would any creature with the inherent ability to deny and refute reality.

"He…well…it was an accident…he must've slipped…"

"Slipped? Don't be stupid. He had dinner, killed the Central 46, nearly murdered us both, and unblinkingly picked up his spoon for dessert."

Denial persisted. "He couldn't have acted alone…maybe Gin forced him to do it!"

"Why, then, did you spend years idiotically revering a man whom you think can be so easily manipulated?"

"There can't be any other explanation. I _know _it. The Aizen-taichou I know would never—"

Hitsugaya interjected sans reverence. "The Aizen-taichou you think you know is dead. Or, more aptly put, he never existed to begin with. You were follower to an illusion, Hinamori. We all were."

She glanced at him, eyes devoid of all emotive nuances, and uttered resolutely, "I trust him, Hitsugaya-san." Distantly, she paused to reflect on why her speech had donned such a remote hostility. "I trust him completely." Why? Why such brazen, reticent treatment of her Shirou-chan? "If he has done this willingly, then it must be in our best interests to—"

"You've got to be kidding!" she spat, his countenance contorting into something that strongly resembled disgust. His eyes, however, those lattices of penetrating ice, eyes as lacerating as any crystalline blade, bespoke a different theory—the notion that in her admiration and obsessive devotion, she had somehow been transmuted into both devotee and…debauchee.

"I would follow him anywhere, Hitsugaya-san." Hitsugaya seemed to blanch at her sudden wintry resiliency.

"You're insane! The man tried to kill you! He _nearly succeeded_ in killing you!" And perhaps she _was _being unreasonable.

But this was reality's doctrine, and Hitsugaya preached from its pulpit.

"Please, tell me where he is. What's become of him?"

"No! What do you presume to do? Find him? _Join _him in acts of conspiracy?"

"I presume to discern his intentions," she responded simply.

"You need more rest. You're obviously delusional, if you intend to pursue him."

"I will _find _him, Hitsugaya-san. With your assistance or without it."

"Hueco Mundo." She was taken aback—primarily as a result of not having expected so brusque and answer with so little applied leverage. And dimly, she could hear his protestations—distorted warnings and muffled demands. "You're not being realistic."

If she were someone else, she would have scoffed.

Realism. Reality.

She had been seduced into the kingdoms of both against her volition, and her imminent departure evinced paroxysms of delight within her.

------

Had it been demanded of Hinamori that she recollect the events of the following few days, upon pain of death, she could only manage to reiterate the saturnine congeries of memories reality attempted to regale her with.

She took no strides in her impending quest, made no attempts to seek out her Aizen-taichou—perpetually under the meticulous and unwavering gaze of steel that Hitsugaya-san seemed to have assimilated as his quotidian adage. Indeed, Hitsugaya needed no words to impugn her—his eyes, lacking in all amenable objectives, were enough to condemn and confine her.

The advent of respite always accompanied the soporific painkillers she was administered, lulling and beckoning her into a callous sleep, devoid of the warmth she yearned for, and especially of the man she sought so diligently.

Hinamori had naught but to wait, to permit torpor's consumption of her. Hitsugaya's attention could pervade her already acerbic sickroom for only so long…

And so she began denying the intoxicating drugs that induced somnolence within her, despite the Fourth Division's amassing and vehement protestations. She was no stranger to the pains of consciousness, and those within the physical realm were perhaps the easiest to endure and surpass. And so she _would _endure, and she _would _wait, though for what vicissitude of fortune it would have been futile to ask.

Her nights were spent in uncompromised lucidity, so that she had developed into a peculiar, simultaneously begrudging and complacent resident of the twilight hours—the sufferable hours—of reality. After three nights of pledged and sworn insomnia, Hinamori had grown accustomed to the opaque darkness of her room, to the distant sounds of running water and shuffling footsteps.

And so her alertness and awareness peaked when the darkness grew murkier, when all outside indications of life—sounds and voices—were extinguished. Silently, deftly, she rose from her sick bed, approaching the sliding wooden panel that both permitted and denied entry into her chamber. Sliding it open and peering with inquisitive eyes at the stillness of surroundings normally vibrant with nightlife, Hinamori laid her hand on the pane, expecting to be met with a coolness characteristic of such a night. Her palm, however, was met with a wholly different sensation—that of warmth, of a pulse…of flesh. A gentle, barely-tangible throbbing that coincided with her own heartbeat in perfect synchronicity, a pulse that enclosed her hand and rendered her immobile.

Steadying herself with a quivering breath, she glanced upward, anticipating viewing the being to which this pulse, this flesh belonged. And the sight issued an edict in her mind that she and reality had diverged paths perhaps permanently. She tumbled into darkness, permeating, fathoms-deep black water, allowing no sentiment or phrase to escape her lips but the name of the entity into whose arms she collapsed.

"A-aizen-taichou…"

------

Hinamori found herself resuming her position in the waking realm through a vestibule of red and black, of curtains spun of an opulent silk and by adroit fingers. Her own digits, overly-sensitized from preceding sensations before a garden shrouded in the graying half-light of the moon, ran along the length of the nearest surface, and she felt a smoothness under her trembling flesh, a softness that contrasted starkly with the linen padding of her futon. Her eyelids were adamant—no methodology or ritual could bring them to grant external images the privilege of gracing Hinamori's inner consciousness with their arrival. Hinamori knew by the placement of her body that whatever surface she had been so unceremoniously cast upon was no wasteland, no barren expanse of ineffable suppleness that had never been disturbed by a living, breathing entity. Distantly, she heard a noise whose identity could only be ascribed to that of fervent scribbling on a sheet or scroll. How frequently had she concealed herself outside her taichou's quarters when Seireitei protocol and etiquette dictated that she was to be entranced and consumed by slumber, by dreams? And that final, apocalyptic night…that very same scribbling that so derisively assaulted her senses at present had with the same unfathomable precision blended with the sounds of nighttime, had so easily lulled her into a sleep from which she'd awake to an imminent desire to doze eternally.

Her taichou had perished that day…and the malignance that had been exacted upon her was manifold.

The notion that the noises she so hopefully, hopelessly analyzed and likened to those of her taichou's nocturnal scriptures were one and the same was ludicrous. She had seen him hovering in the air, a trail of crimson streaming steadily and ardently from his frame as some hellish crucifixion medium; she had viewed his half-lidded, lifeless eyes. What damned necropolis, what condemned perdition had she been spirited to?

Her restless stroking of the silk sheets had obviously earned her the attention of the chamber's second occupant, for the writing had ceased and the being Hinamori breathlessly and intuitively believed was her esteemed, estranged taichou spoke.

"Are you finally awake, Hinamori-kun?"

She exhaled slowly, gradually, and again experienced that paradoxical anticipation. She had spent fruitless hours in a near-quixotic state, renouncing and debasing whatever gods her mind wrapped itself around and like an inebriated fool stipulating and awaiting Aizen Sousuke's resurrection. And if memory served her correctly, his was a voice whose timbre and vibrato she had studied with a religious fervor, a voice she would be wont to forget or forsake.

And thus arrived the antithesis of her joy: if this man whose presence, whose bodily warmth she sensed mere meters from her was Aizen, if Aizen-taichou was indeed alive, it stood to reason that Hitsugaya's words had been verbatim. It occurred to her, as she forced weary lids to unfold and glanced at the pale figure before her, a figure that emanated a vampyric, sultry luminescence, that some desire for requite should have arisen within her, and yet…she experienced no such breach of overwhelming, black yen.

"Aizen-taichou…" she breathed, her voice far coarser to her ears than recollection could summon.

Aizen laid his pen down atop his written endeavor, rising from behind his distant tomb and approaching Hinamori, whose lithe form was contorted into a caricature of propriety. Never had her captain gazed upon her while she existed in such a state of emaciated, despondent submission. She scrambled into a sitting position, unfailingly realizing that she had been lying on a bed, as she had suspected. Her hasty transformation evidently amused Aizen, for he allowed a smile to overtake his features—a smile laced with frugal benevolence, akin to a strain of saccharine poison.

Hinamori was aware of what effects poison implemented upon the body—the stilling of the flow of blood through one's veins, the stopping of the heart, the effacing of all semblance of life. And a _sweet_ poison…well, such was the most dangerous sort, was it not? Poison bore many various guises, each more seducing than the last, each enticing enough to serve its purpose. And Aizen-taichou was a most beguiling, a most rapacious toxin.

She recalled that her implausible affection and admiration for the man who had just seated himself on a stool near her sinfully comfortable bedside had sprung primarily from the philistine kindness he seemed to have exuded upon their first encounter. She had been drawn to his pristine power, and now…she beheld an entirely different aura escaping Aizen in almost sensory, near tangible wafts.

It was darker, more incarnadine, and yet infinitely more invasive. Earlier, she would have sacrificed everything for this man—her life, her soul, the ability to dream. And now, the metamorphosed power he reeked of felt both abhorrent—foul—and strangely fortifying, as though where she had previously deemed to sacrifice for him, she would do more—she would be his ally, his able-bodied protector…

…his equal.

And she was determined to divulge from him as many answers to her varied concerns as she could.

"Aizen-taichou, you're…"

"Alive?" He smiled his deprecating smile, leaned his chin on a powerful, sinewy hand.

"Y-yes." She could not fathom why she continued to stutter, to gaze upon him as though he were an icon, a messiah.

"I trust you understand how this is possible." Aizen paused, allowing Hinamori a moment to reflect. And while Hitsugaya had relayed to her that Aizen was, in fact, among the living, he failed to specify how this had transpired.

She swallowed, responding in her characteristically thin and deferential voice. "I'm afraid not."

"Suffice it to say that I never truly died, Hinamori-kun. That body all of you saw that day was nothing more than an illusion—a doppelganger, if you will," Aizen summarized.

"And…the Central 46?"

"I've not known you to be so subtle, so circumspect in choosing your words. What of the Central 46?"

Hinamori allowed the words to pass her lips, pleased to find that they lacked a quavering capable of betraying how truly forlorn, disillusioned she felt. "Is it true that you killed them?"

Aizen rose, spreading his fingers and touching the pads of the digits to their mates—left thumb to right thumb, left index finger to right index finger. He paced for a few transient moments, the epitome of abstraction. Hinamori was bewitched by his circular footsteps, fancying that she could see the spiral they wove upon the carpet—one that complemented their fulsome surroundings rather effectively.

"Yes, I did."

"And did y—?"

"Hinamori-kun, you are quite well-acquainted with what I've done. I assure you, whatever information Hitsugaya-taichou chose to provide you with shortly after you regained consciousness was not a fable he fabricated. I murdered the Central 46 and I am indeed a traitor. And you, Hinamori-kun…you have your own recollections, your own remembrance. You are truly in no need of a detailed account." His lips twitched in a mockery of the smile he'd once worn, and rather a poor mimesis it was. Hinamori nodded, moving her head vertically to and fro in a dull, transfixed manner—more so to herself than to the man addressing her.

She surveyed him, this creature of an opulent and onyx ambience, of paradoxical morals and methods. Gone was his crystalline purity, his godlike presence. Hinamori had once regarded him as religious enthusiasts regard their own separate deities—if not a god, then keeper of holy writ…indeed, a messiah.

And one needed no heightened perception, awareness, or observation to perceive that her messiah was dead.

"No…" he continued, circling slowly, purposefully. "You sought me not to unearth _what_ had occurred, but _why_."

"So I was right then? Ichimaru-taichou is responsible for all of this, isn't he?"

She wanted to reprimand herself. Why was she still spouting these inanities like a perpetual fountain of tepid thought?

Aizen stopped pacing.

"You know the answer to that, Hinamori-kun."

"Then why, Aizen-taichou?" she demanded, the audacity in her voice surprising her, though not denying her the necessary confidence to continue. "Has this been your plan all along? To enrage Soul Society and instigate a war?"

"Hinamori-kun, you became my fukutaichou not because I had any particular appreciation for you, but through endless toil and preparation. And you _remained _my fukutaichou not through brawn, but through dexterity and acumen."

"What are you trying to say?"

"That there is a method to my madness, and that you are insightful enough to understand what it is." Aizen returned to the wooden chair positioned near the bed—a chair of a mahogany hue and a glazed appearance, perhaps the least lavish artifact in the chamber, though nevertheless fashioned well-enough to serve its purpose. He laid his hand on the back, gazing, examining. "Not even God can reign in Heaven—no, it is a position much too coveted for one such as He. It is a throne that must be earned, and I intend to do so." Aizen folded his arms. "Well now, Hinamori-kun. I've answered your questions—do me the honor of answering mine. Why did you hope to find me?"

Hinamori sat up straighter. "Because I wanted answers. I wanted to understand."

"And do you?"

She nodded.  
"But that's not all, is it?" he inquired, disengaging the chair from its traditional location and moving it aside, himself taking a step towards her. Hinamori marveled at how he so effortlessly, so casually managed to peer inside her mind, to read any thought no matter how encrypted.

But Hinamori had long since formulated a course of action regarding her taichou, and would have adhered to this blueprint even if Aizen had been the Devil Incarnate himself. He was certainly transformed in terms of appearance—his hair was swept away from his eyes, gone were his comely glasses—but the being before her still possessed the name of "Aizen Sousuke," and was still warden of its power. "I have no intentions of returning to Soul Society, Aizen-tai—Aizen-sama. I have sworn allegiance to you and you alone, and so I will follow you to Heaven if I must…and even to Hell if such is the course your endeavor takes," she responded decisively.

Aizen leaned forward and uttered in a dangerous whisper, a whisper that produced breath maddeningly, tantalizingly warm against her bare neck: "I surmised as much, Hinamori-kun."

She refrained from inhaling a single breath whilst he was in such close proximity, awaiting the moment when he would draw back and when she would permit the admission of air. But Aizen did not pull away, leaning even closer to her neck, brushing his lips across skin damp with the breaking of a fever. Hinamori gasped at the sensation, audibly enough for Aizen to hear and appreciate the effect such a minimal gesture was having; she'd felt his lips curve into a smile.

"And you'll be aptly rewarded for your loyalty…"

------

Her next hour was a series of sensations, simultaneously painful and welcomed—breath-pilfering sources of rapture she wanted to eliminate, to circumvent. And yet what she could not circumvent was her fisting of his robes, the manner in which she gasped and moaned as he trailed his tongue down her neck—she was loath to admit it, but with each trembling exhalation she pleaded with him, desperately, imploring him to continue.

Aizen paused, examining Hinamori's flushed, moist face, before inclining his head and grazing his teeth lightly, maddeningly against her much-attended-to neck, before biting into it, penetrating the fallible softness of her skin and drawing blood.

"A-Aizen-sama…" she panted, "what are you…?" Aizen leaned forward, enclosing those long, pale, spider-like fingers around her neck, applying pressure until she could no longer breathe.

"Do you trust me, Hinamori-kun?" he questioned rather nonchalantly. Hinamori gripped his arm, attempting vainly to remove it, to terminate this asphyxiation. And the more she struggled, the tighter his grip became, until she began to flail less, to loosen her own futile grasp on his arm.

Had this been a ploy, yet another morbid illusion cast by him? Had his aspiration been to kill her from the second she had collapsed in his arms—to finish his handiwork where he had failed in Soul Society? Hinamori gazed into his eyes by means of her own syncopated vision, and was met with—if not utter ennui—a very mild form of curiosity. And she realized—and mocked herself for having allowed it to escape her awareness earlier—that she was far too insignificant, her existence far too minuscule for him—a master conspirator—to have devoted a second of his time to the fabrication of a scheme to rob her of her life. No, she had staged her own clever deception in his stead—she had dared assume that he had somehow gravitated towards her, that in her present state (or rather, her present fragility), he had deemed her worth of any exceptional attention.

But those eyes, overwhelmed by an almost _innocent_ curiosity, dictated otherwise, and seemed to beckon with their intangible depths that for Hinamori to obtain and claim the recognition she so pined for, she would have to _earn_ it, merit it, just as God was required to earn His throne.

"I…I do…" she replied finally, still clinging to his wrist. His grip loosened, and she added, "I trust you completely, Aizen-sama." And with a particularly emboldened spark of inspiration, of brazen impudence and insubordination, she clasped her own delicate fingers on the lapels of his jacket and drew him to her, pressing her cold, pallor-laced lips to his, reveling in this proximity, in the satisfying of a hunger that had afflicted her since her return to consciousness.

Aizen smirked into her lips as they coaxed his, entertaining his own satisfaction, though she knew not from whence it came. She sensed one of his arms move from their position at his sides, and glimpsed him drawing out an object, one that caught the light of a nearby candle flame and glistened—beautifully, perilously. She pulled away, surveying it carefully. Aizen's everlasting amusement would not dissipate as he brought the dagger close to her flimsy robe, running it along the collar and finally halting the blade at the sash, toying with it lightly. Hinamori was mystified by how fluently he was able to undergo a transition from such potent cruelty to calculating and yet gentle patience. He seemed to be waiting for her consent.

She nodded in affirmation, though what, precisely, she had just permitted she could not imagine. In one nimble movement, he had sliced cleanly through the sash, and began drawing back the robe—vigilantly, scrupulously. Hinamori eyed the slab of metal as he brought it close to her chest, inhaling as the tip of the blade touched a spot just between her breasts, exhaling a quiet cry as it was pressed into her skin in the formation of a small, yet deep laceration. Blood pooled in a small circle of scarlet, and Aizen lessened the pressure, instead drawing the steel downward, creating a thin, superficial mutilation, a minute ribbon of red that ended a few millimeters below her navel. The cut burned as though he had borrowed the services of nearby candle wax for his purposes, and she clung to his sleeve, feeling the sharpness of her own nails through the cloth as they dug into the palm of her hand. Aizen, if at all alerted to her actions, betrayed no reaction to them and simply laid the penknife aside, moving upward once more, lying in wait above the rivulets of blood, of streaming liquid that appeared dark in the flickering candlelight. She watched him, eyes wide with anticipation, and he met her gaze unabashedly as he lowered his head over the uppermost section of the stream, closing his mouth over it and soothing it with his tongue. Hinamori's breathing hitched as he descended lower, his ministrations persisting below the end of the gash, affecting a point within her that eradicated her so-abhorred, so-reviled conscious thought until all she could bring herself to do was grip tufts of his brown hair between her fingers, leaning her neck back as the softness spilled over her fingers, as she drew him closer.

After all, what better way was there to equalize oneself to a god than by immersing him in sin?

But despite a grip she attempted to transform into something immortal, he easily shook free from it, replacing his nimble tongue with equally skilled fingers. As he slipped one finger inside and followed with another, all the while never permitting the interruption of his gaze upon her perspiring countenance, she discovered a nouveau fabric to fist and tear as she experienced the concurrent pleasure and ache of his exploits: that of his newly dampened, silk sheets. He performed the task with a logically calculated, even scientific exactitude, so _professionally _that she could not help but wonder whether he was simply toying with her, tormenting her. It possessed an astonishing symmetry to their previous encounter—she had gone to him, and she had been rendered a helpless, powerless husk.

Aizen's gaze traveled from her features to her chest, and subsequently to the newborn scar that had appeared below her ribcage in the time since they had last met. Hinamori was momentarily distracted, confused by his sudden riveted stare, pondering whether he was ruminating over the fact that the disfigurement was an infliction of his own.

So meditative, so cogitative…Hinamori admired how brilliantly his eyes gleamed with pools of reflected luminosity as they darted over her stomach, and she herself wondered…would he tear open a scar both physical and emotional, was he capable of such intractable malice?

Her Aizen-taichou was not. But _this_ man—this reformed, unreachable man—could glorify any agony, any pathos. Additional pain was certainly forthcoming, and she winced in anticipation, lacking the courage to seek out the blade he would employ for the purpose.

She found her eyes opening in mere moments, however, shocked from their passivity, as Aizen, with lips curved balefully upon his deified disposition, kissed the scar with mock munificence, feigned tenderness.

Indeed…Aizen Sousuke-sama was capable of inconceivable cruelty.

And another observation had not escaped her notice—the past few precious moments had featured his devoting his talents to the exploitation of her body, nothing more. He himself gained a satisfaction purely intellectual—if any—from his efforts, and—if she could ever hope for a flicker of interest to pass through those blasé, russet spheres—this situation was in need of immediate rectifying.

"A-aizen-sama…" she managed, focusing her energy on ignoring the excruciating, overwhelming, and wonderful things his fingers were doing inside her. She reached out and grasped his wrist with her tiny hand—a child's hand, really—and extricated his fingers from her. "I want to serve you, Aizen-sama…" she continued in a husky whisper, breathless with exertion. "Please…allow me…"

Albeit appearing entirely unsurprised, Aizen's curiosity transfigured into enjoyment, amusement as a brief flicker of understanding passed between them. As he traveled upward, his eyes meeting hers once more, Hinamori heard the rustling of cloth, the sounds of it falling away—meeting perhaps with the silk of the sheets or the coarseness of the carpeting. Seconds later, he was inside her, and Hinamori bit her lip as tears sprang to her eyes. She had endured before, and for a cause of such enormity, she would endure again.

She pressed her body against his, wrapping her arms around his back and bringing him as close as she possibly could, rising to meet his every thrust, inviting him, drawing him deeper inside her. Her fingers raked his back as his thrusts grew less tame, cleaving red marks to which he paid absolutely no heed, until she no longer felt his movements, experienced nothing but a vast elimination of thought, an eruption of luminous obsidian and scarlet—and a gasp, a moan, and a cry later, the color receded, thought returned, and her formerly rigid form collapsed onto the bed, sensing Aizen follow moments later. She smiled bitterly, chest heaving, for she feared that she had been poisoned, that irreversible anti-ambrosia had entered her body. And as she pressed her ear against his chest, breathing with the rhythm of his heartbeats, she fathomed entirely that for a sweetness such as this, this syrupy, black elixir which she never expected to obtain, she was willing not only to sacrifice her life, but to regale Death, to submit herself willingly into its throes if such was demanded of her. She shut her eyes.

The sacrament was complete.

------

Hinamori Momo, adorned in flowing robes of white, leaned against the fortified wall, lurking in encompassing shadow, lying in wait. Footsteps drew near—singular, sole footfalls, and ones whose owner she had no difficulty ascertaining, having grown and matured with them close by.

As Hitsugaya Toushirou sauntered past her, she surfaced from shadow, from the dark, and placed herself behind him.

"Shirou-chan," she called cheerfully, admiring how swiftly he turned when hearing an age-old nickname uttered by a familiar voice. It was amusing, to be sure, for the sentiment behind it was now purely artificial.

"Hinamori!" His eyes lit up and he took several steps toward her. "You're all right…" She heard his soft sigh of relief. "We've been worried…thought Aizen might have come to finish what he started."

"No…" she replied gently. "But I have."

"…what?"

"You're my first assignment, Shirou-chan." Hitsugaya, evidently baffled, drew closer to her. Hinamori's hand sprung to Tobiume's hilt immediately.

"Hinamori…what are you talking about?" He was smiling—surely she was kidding, he thought. Hinamori closed her eyes in quiet circumspection.

"Perhaps you've noticed my new uniform. I am quite simply not a member of the Gotei 13 any longer."

Hinamori had always admired Hitsugaya's brilliance—he was not the youngest captain for lack of merit. He had evidently understood.

"You're in league with him, then? _That's _where you've been? Hinamori…he's _evil_. The man you…you loved…he doesn't exist and never did, don't you understand that?"

"The man I swore loyalty to is still very much alive," Hinamori interceded, unsheathing Tobiume. "Now, please, Shirou-chan. Bring out Hyourinmaru…it doesn't strike me as fair, killing you without allowing you the opportunity to fend me off."

"Hinamori..." he breathed. "I don't want to see you kill anyone. Not for his sake."

She glanced at him blandly. "And you won't have to."

Hitsugaya chuckled. "It's funny, isn't it? How the task now falls to me, to care for _you_?"

Hinamori heaved a pedantic sigh, tightening her hold on Tobiume. "You've tried so desperately to be my savior, practically the messiah of the Gotei 13." Hitsugaya's sole response to her soft, delectable words was a hardening glance, a resumed and impassable sheet of ice. "But didn't you know, Hitsugaya-san?" she remarked, preparing to unleash her shikai, to make her contribution to a fresh thaw. "Messiahs…" She glanced up to meet his eyes, eyes from which she had darted before—the cold light of which she intended to smother. "…they die young."

------

Aaand…that's all. Tell me what you think: questions, complaints, criticisms, comments, anything. Thanks for reading.


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